London Lightning: Bolts 'happy' with unbalanced schedule

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The London Lightning will open the National Basketball League of Canada schedule on the road for the 2017-18 season.

The Lightning travels to St. Catharines on Saturday, Nov. 18 to take on the Niagara River Lions. It will be one of three games that will kick off the league’s seventh season.

The defending NBL champions will not play again until their season opener at Budweiser Gardens on Sunday, Nov. 26 at 2 p.m.

The opponent will be the Halifax Hurricanes, the team the Lightning beat in the NBL final last year after losing to them the year before.

With the addition of the St. John’s, NL., franchise the schedule has taken on an unbalanced look. St. John’s will play in the Central Division with the Lightning, Kitchener-Waterloo Titans, River Lions and Windsor Express. That will give the league two five-team divisions.

The unbalanced schedule will see the Lightning playing St. John’s seven times; four of those games are in St. John’s. To balance the schedule the Lightning will not play the Cape Breton Highlanders in Sydney. They will play them at Budweiser Gardens though.

“We’re happy with the schedule,” said Lightning owner Vito Frijia, who is also the league’s president. “We had some challenges as a league because most of us are not the main tenants in our building. In order to balance out the schedule one of the central teams had to go out to St. John’s one more time so we’ll be the team doing it. That means we won’t play Cape Breton out there.”

The schedule is put together by an independent schedule-maker and must be approved by all the team owners.

The Lightning plays all the other teams in their conference eight times. The Bolts have drawn the Ceasar’s Palace game against the Express in Windsor. That game is February 21.

The Lightning has spread their games throughout the week. They do not have a regular season game on Monday or Tuesday but they play five times on Sunday and Thursday, four times on Saturday, and three times on Friday and Wednesday.